25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Cosmos | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Cosmos

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With each new scene, 'Cosmos' becomes ever more corporeal, visceral, discomfiting – it is a production that repels and disgusts. It shatters the long-held stereotype of Jarocki’s theatre as 'cold', concerned solely with intellect.

Perhaps biographies should be told from the end – especially when death does not arrive unannounced but signals its approach, granting time to prepare, to tidy one’s affairs, to bid farewell to people, places and texts. From that perspective, the story of Jerzy Jarocki’s theatrical life begins with The Case, staged a year before the 83-year-old director’s death – an adaptation of Samuel Zborowski by Juliusz Słowacki (National Theatre, Warsaw, 2011). An unexpected, eccentric, insolent piece, bursting out of every frame; it’s impossible to decide whether it was brilliant or catastrophically misguided. Like Tadeusz Kantor’s Today is My Birthday, it is the perfect confirmation of Edward W. Said’s observations in On Late Style: a digressive, fragmented, chaotic work in which disintegration manifests in both content and form, created against the expectations of the age, the audience and the critics – and against the artist’s own lifelong style. A style defined, from his 1957 debut (The Mannequins’ Ball), by precision, clarity, restraint and sceptical intellectualism.

The Case was an epilogue that arrived after a string of farewells to the writers Jarocki returned to throughout his career: Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Różewicz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and, above all, Witold Gombrowicz. Jarocki bid Mrożek farewell while the playwright was still alive, staging Tango (2009) and Love in Crimea (2007). A planned return to Różewicz failed for reasons beyond the director’s control. His last dialogue with Witkacy came earlier, in Act Three After “The Shoemakers” (2002). But it was the farewell to Gombrowicz – arguably the most important of the four, and unquestionably the most artistically significant, as critics agreed – that defined this last phase of his work. It had two incarnations, both at Warsaw’s National Theatre and partly with the same cast: first the sprawling, multi-threaded Erring (2004), assembling fragments of Gombrowicz’s plays, prose, Diaries and biographical traces into a portrait of the writer; and the second, concentrated, minimalist (despite its three-hour running time) adaptation of Cosmos (2005).

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Though utterly unlike The Case, Cosmos too aligns with Said’s reflections on ‘late style’. Gombrowicz’s final novel, published five years before his death, is the work of a gravely ill writer trying to draw together scattered episodes of his life, to impose meaning on events, to seek a metaphysical logic behind (perhaps illusory) coincidences. His narrator-protagonist – also named Witold – attempts precisely the same thing. And Jarocki, in staging the novel, repeats the same gesture, with all its consequences.

In the novel, the dominant colour is black – the title refers to the night sky, an abyss humanity attempts to tame by linking thousands of stars into constellations and familiar shapes. On stage, the opposite seems to be true. Jerzy Juk Kowarski’s set turns the small Wierzbowa stage into something like a three-dimensional coordinate system: the white cube’s walls sliced with numbered parallel lines, the floor laid with pale boards. It suggests order – perhaps a laboratory for an experiment, or a prison. Or simply a theatre refusing to pretend it is anything else.

Theatricality is equally ostentatious in the entrance of the two protagonists. In the novel, students Witold and Fuks wander through Tatra landscapes. In Jarocki’s version, they stride briskly in circles across the empty stage, gazing at imagined peaks, pointing at non-existent houses, talking as they walk. Yet they hail from two different theatrical worlds. Oskar Hamerski’s Witold is unmistakably a figure of contemporary theatre (or perhaps of Jarocki’s theatre more broadly, akin to roles once played by Jerzy Trela or Jerzy Radziwiłowicz): dressed in a dark jumper and jeans, restrained in gesture, speaking Gombrowicz’s dense prose in a low, matte voice with careful thought and impeccable command of its musicality and peculiar philosophical rhythm. He repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly, commenting on events.

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Marcin Hycnar’s Fuks, meanwhile, is a character from a pre-war comedy – energetic, cheeky, slightly boyish, with unruly ginger hair, wire-rimmed glasses and an old-fashioned traveller’s outfit. No wonder: he was born in Witold’s imagination, perhaps dredged up from its recesses.

During this stage-wander, they encounter the first disruption of the sterile order: a sparrow that has been hanged. Suspended by wire, it seems painfully real – one almost expects blood to drip from its limp head. Against the pristine white walls it becomes an aesthetic, ontological and ethical scandal. Who hanged it, and why? Their questions echo off the empty space. Rarely in Polish theatre or literature does the problem of evil and death appear so starkly, stripped of religious, “spiritual” or therapeutic cushioning. Trying to make sense of the sparrow’s absurd death triggers an avalanche. A suspended stick, an arrow on the ceiling – everything seems loaded with significance. Witold and Fuks search for meanings signalled by these signs, trying to stitch the world’s illegible hieroglyphs into coherent sentences.

Hycnar and Hamerski illuminate, with remarkable clarity, the multiplicity of the characters Gombrowicz created: child-like adventurers, detectives, sceptical scientists, inspired Kabbalists, paranoid conspiracy theorists and self-deprecating philosophers. Their constant heated debates stretch the rope of meaning so tautly that its snapping seems inevitable. The signs will prove empty; forcing them together leads not to order but to aberration and perversity.

The next rupture comes after their encounter with the sparrow. Hidden doors in the walls open, revealing Katasia (Beata Fudalej), her deformed, gaping, saliva-slicked mouth obscene, her behaviour enigmatic. In Jarocki’s reading, the ‘dark’ maid seems the reverse of the ‘light’ young gentlewoman Lena; Lena (Małgorzata Kożuchowska) radiates the troubling eroticism of a Balthus dream-nymph, pretending not to know she is being watched. A murky sexual bond connects the two women.

As Jarocki follows the novel closely, the stage gradually fills with characters whose grotesqueness and failure to communicate become opportunities for distinct, sharply drawn performances. Mariusz Bonaszewski’s Ludwik, Lena’s husband, is silent, still, illegible – yet impossible to ignore, a man in whom darkness quietly accumulates. Zbigniew Zapasiewicz and Anna Seniuk, as Leon and Kulka, amplify and absurdly heighten all the traits beloved by Warsaw audiences. Zapasiewicz, a virtuoso of precise diction and polished gesture, sinks ever deeper into mannered self-display until admiration turns to embarrassment – another iteration of Leon’s masturbatory self-absorption. Seniuk plays the familiar, weary, archetypally Polish matron, easily drawing empathy before detonating it with a decorum-shattering fit of rage (Witold’s suspicion that she might have murdered her son-in-law seems far less absurd here than in the novel). Gombrowicz’s ‘terrible townsfolk’ are not Zapolska-style hypocrites but monsters out of Elfriede Jelinek or Ulrich Seidl.

With each scene, the production becomes more bodily, more physiological, more difficult to bear – repelling and disgusting. It demolishes the assumption that Jarocki’s theatre stirred only the mind, perhaps occasionally emotions, but never raw affect. Watching the eloquent, refined intellectual Witold descend into layers of cruelty and perversion within himself, expounding his philosophy with wild, fevered eyes, becomes increasingly unbearable. His nihilism shocks us when he hangs Lena’s beloved cat. His musings that the next victim should be Lena – or himself – are more shocking still. And then come two utterly intolerable scenes, after which Jarocki’s vocal defence of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Cleansed at the height of its controversy becomes entirely understandable.

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‘I have hung the cat already. But a cat is a cat. And here, for the first time, I was peering into a human death. Into the human mouth – hung,” says Witold, staring at the blackened lips of Ludwik’s corpse. Then he inserts his finger into the mouth, desecrating the body, probing the throat. Moments later, he shoves and topples the terrified young priest assisting in the search and violates him in the same manner. All of it unfolds in full view of the audience, forced to confront Witold’s reddened, saliva-coated, rigid finger almost in close-up against the immaculate set.

It takes immense courage, at the end of one’s life, to summarise half a century of constructing meaning in theatre and in the world with such merciless clarity. To echo Witold: ‘We approached the known place, but our gaze beat in vain against the blackness – or rather against the multiplicity of blacknesses’.

National Theatre, Warsaw
Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
Directed by Jerzy Jarocki
Set design by Jerzy Juk Kowarski
Music by Stanisław Radwan
Premiere: 16th October 2005

_{Anna R. Burzyńska is a literary scholar and theatre researcher. She teaches at the Department of Theatre and Drama at Jagiellonian University and was editor of}_{Didaskalia Theatre Gazette}_{from 2000 to 2024. She most recently published}_{The Anatomical Atlas of Georg Büchner}_(2022).

Language English